Monday, July 12, 2010

[alt text: "Dear editors of Homeopathy Monthly: I have two small corrections for your July issue. One, it's spelled "echinacea", and two, homeopathic medicines are no better than placebos and your entire magazine is a sham."]

Well! Now that the shit storm from last week has mostly died down, and Randall has added a whole new apology where the tag line of his blog used to be. Even though most of us assumed that adding "zing!" to his insult was enough to make it ok, the new notice is there so that we don't take Randall comment the wrong way. When he said "Anthropology is not a real science, and it's really easy, and so you get plenty of free time, and if you are working hard at anthropology it's probably because you are very stupid," he just meant it as "a friendly jibe at a cool field." Well that settles that!

Although I also want to point out that he clearly calls the text that pops up when you hover over a comic to be its "alt-text." Can people please stop giving me a hard time about this now? Even Randall and I agree on this!

Now i've gotten all distracted and forgotten what this comic was about. Let me just have a l-OH HOLY CRAP, IT WAS THE SEMEN INJECTION THING. WHYYYYYYY

I guess I should start by pointing out that despite what some people are saying, the "jab" at homeopathy in this comic is completely different from the "jab" at anthropology in the last comic, for a simple reason: Anthropology, unlike homeopathy, is not bullshit. Calling anthro not real science is just being a prick. Mocking homeopathy, on the other hand, is fine, because being a pseudoscience it is in fact the definition of something pretending to be a science that is completely not. So on that count, at least, Randall certainly gets a pass.

That said, making fun of pseudoscience is like shooting very stupid fish in a barrel (fish who are wearing amethyst bracelets to protect themselves from bullets). As far as I know, homeopathy isn't in the news right now, and is as stupid now as it was a decade ago (or inevitably will be a decade from now). As a target for mockery, it strikes me as too easy. For example. (understand that i am linking to that video not to complain about it, but to use it as an example of this being done before, being done easily, and being done better)

But of course, that's not what anyone will remember from this comic. They'll remember the part where the dude makes a diluted semen mixture in an attempt to impregnate the girl. Maybe you read webcomics to see stick figures play with their ejaculate; that would just be another way that you and I are different. So I found that the gross out factor of this comic - in the context, of course, of the dozens of other far-too-much-information xkcds - just a little distressing.

Then there's the caption. Now I don't really care whether homeopathy's point is that you dilute things a lot but the water into which you've diluted them ends up more potent than the original substance, or if homeopathy says that by ingesting an absurdly small, possibly nonexistent amount of a bad substance, you immunize yourself to anything else which could possibly give you the same symptoms as the toxin. (like I said, it is just stupid as hell). Clearly, one makes this comic make sense and one makes the comic make no sense. But the logic of this comic still is pretty dumb: How would belief in homeopathy be genetic? That is silly. No "beliefs" are genetic. They can be passed down from parent to child, but not genetically. I mean, I guess it's to be expected that a webcomic author wouldn't know an actual science like biology. zing!

This is another comic where an aspect of pregnancy particularly burdensome on the woman - in this case, actually being pregnant - is portrayed as being shared equally. The text is "we'll be sure to get pregnant now" as opposed to the more, say, accurate "I'll be sure to get pregnant now" or even "we'll be sure to get me pregnant now." There are other examples - when a woman who has just given birth says something like "sweet! we made a baby!" and maybe some more. I'd love to link you to them but HEY, the search function on the homepage just disappeared! DAMN. That's ok, i guess, it was pretty bad at doing its job. Maybe he'll bring it back soon with a better database of his comics?

OK guys, almost done with this one. Let's get to the alt-text, conveniently reproduced below the comic above. I actually really liked the alt-text. I liked that he found a homeopathy magazine, pointed out that it made an elementary mistake, used that to question its basic grasp of science, and then just came out and completely insulted the whole premise of the magazine. It was well done, I thought. Lucky he found a typo in the July issue of Homeopathy Monthly magazine, I thought! Then people pointed out that Homeopathy Monthly is a sham, not in the sense of "it spreads dangerous lies to people" but in the sense of "it doesn't exist and Randall made it up."

I think that is the definition of a Straw Man, no? (not counting the definition "a man made from straw.") He sets up a fake magazine to act as the proxy for the homeopathy industry, claims it made a dumb typo, uses this to show that the magazine is dumb, and uses that to show that the industry is dumb. But the whole mistake wasn't real! he made it up! So what is the point?

Guys, can you believe the stupid thing Politician X said about the gulf oil spill? He said that the birds covered in oil should be happy about it, because they can sell the oil for lots of money! That's so stupid. I should use the same logic and spill oil all over Politician X's car, house, family, and legislative district. I'll tell him it's a campaign donation!

This might be funny if a person had actually made that claim about birds in the gulf of mexico (well, maybe not funny, but i didn't try very hard). But since I made up the quote, who cares?

And lastly, the baster that the man is holding, the one which will be inserted into the woman, appears to be the same length as the distance from the woman's knee to her foot, and wider than her leg. Discuss.

Look, it's not good for any reasonable value of good, but... I don't know. I feel like my standards are getting lower and lower, because this one honestly didn't piss me off at all. Maybe that's Randall's plan: "If I do a bunch of crappy comics, then they'll look on the occasional mediocre comic as ridiculously awesome! Mwahaha!"

I look at it and think, "Well, it didn't overtly offend any groups of undeserving people, there are no detailed vagina pictures, it's not a chart, the logic is at least self-consistent... better than average, maybe?"

The caption for this comic is also terribly punctuated and thus needlessly confusing. As far as I can tell, it would be a lot better and more clear if the commas were just removed. This is just in addition to the fact that it is totally stupid to say that a belief can be genetically inherited.

A lot of people have been writing about that, but quite frankly, I think it doesn't really matter. All of homeopathy is stupid, and a lot of these pseudosciences aren't even self consistent, and it's not like any of it makes sense. I don't think randall has to be meticulous in his research on this one.

As for genetics...I'd be willing to wager that most conversations concerning 'selection' in the biological sense involve genetic material that predisposes one population/species for survival (and therefore offspring) but:

a) This is not always the case: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/329/5988/212b) Even if it was, one has to be trying hard not to see the joke. The idea that something pre-disposes a group to successfully carrying on their genes. Might include not knowing that more sperm is (generally speaking) better.

I don't agree. Homeopathic medicine is based around the idea that dilution of the agents that cause symptoms treats the symptoms symptoms. It's "consistent" in that regard because that's literally the definition of the movement.

I mean, yes, it's ridiculous pseudoscience, but if you're going to write in a high-handed manner about something I think it behooves one to actually understand it.

I suppose that, being a real scientist, Randall doesn't have a lot of time for "research."

"And lastly, the baster that the man is holding, the one which will be inserted into the woman, appears to be the same length as the distance from the woman's knee to her foot, and wider than her leg. Discuss."

All of you homeopathy bashers need to go get a life and do some homeopathy research because you don't know what you're talking about.

There is literally tons of anecdotal evidence about homeopathy's effects and bias in the scientific community is hampering attempts to properly study its documented effects.

Water has a fascinating ability to retain properties associated with other substances, and homeopathy simply takes advantage of the so-called "water memory" as a means of helping people being failed by mainstream physicians. Water memory is in fact a concept that has been embraced by many scientists and it is perfectly legitimate to take adantage of its benefits, without the grim cost associated with many pharmaceuticals.

Contrary to what has been claimed here, this comic is in fact far less fair than the one about anthropologists. Anthropologists at least have the numbers to come out in force on these boards, which is exactly what happened in the days following 764's publishing. Homeopaths on the other hand lack the sheer numbers of anthropologists and cannot generate a proper resistance.

Randy and Carl should both be ashamed of themselves. What if a sick person doesn't even TRY homeopathy because of this, and then dies?

maybe the comic actually has a point, unintentionally? like, back before plumbing and shit, when we had to kill bears to live, you couldn't believe in stupid garbage, or you'd die. but now that we have medicine and iphones, you can believe whatever the fuck, and still live to have kids, and then teach them your retarded-ass beliefs.

weird that as science gets more and more badass, its basic effect is to ensure that more and more people can survive without actually knowing fuck all

implying that this is the comic's intended message seems kinda farfetched though

Anon: obvious troll is obvious, etc. I think you gave yourself away with "literally tons of anecdotal evidence." Because, as you know, no matter how many literal tons of anecdotal evidence you have, it doesn't add up to actual scientific evidence. I'd say if you changed that, got rid of the "water memory" stuff, spell "advantage" correctly, and don't refer to comment threads on a blog as "these boards," you maybe will be a more successful troll in the future. GOOD LUCK, MY FRIEND.

it does raise an interesting ethical dilemma. are we removing people's ability to heal by means of the placebo effect by debunking pseudoscience like homeopathy? is our knowledge killing gullible people?

also, to add to anon 10:02: "What if a sick person doesn't even TRY homeopathy because of this, and then dies? "Their families will have more money to deal with funeral costs etc without having wasted it on pseudoscientific bullshit that only gave them false hope?

I made the point about him getting homeopathy wrong because I think if he had applied it correctly here, the comic would have been a lot stronger. It would be much stronger if they were putting together a a bogus spermicide, and the punchline was something like "Evolutionary selection isn't always a good thing." He doesn't even need to directly name homeopathy. He could have made fun of homeopathy without making it the punchline.

The actual comic seems petty and weak because all it does is say "Hah! Homeopathy is false! What morons...and we smart people know that the morons don't get to reproduce, right? That's evolutionary selection!"

Homeopathics is like Shrodinger's Cat -- once someone tells you it doesn't work they have just killed the cat. Except instead of "killing", it's "failed to alleviate anxiety". And I think we all know who the cat is, Rob.

I'll start then, because I don't give to hoots about Homeopathic medicine... except that for a second I thought that taking Zinc supplements or whatever the fuck actually fell in to the same category, can someone tell me if I'm right or wrong in thinking this?

Whatever; so according to Carl, Randall has fucked up with his sense of depth and lines and fancy art words that I don't know. How is this any different from any other comic? He somehow always finds away to fuck up something simple but who cares, we all kind of know what it is he's talking about, so we can connect the dots right? Well that is truly lazy but he doesn't care either.

This just made me realise something... why do they always use basters? I am not of the female gender, so I don't know what things going in certain places feels like, but I've looked at a baster, and that thing sure doesn't look like it would be "exciting" to have shoved up there, so how come there's no penis shaped/feeling basters in production for the sake of the women folk?

Well, I'll leave everyone to stew over something that is more fucking disgusting than anything Carl could've come up with :)

"it does raise an interesting ethical dilemma. are we removing people's ability to heal by means of the placebo effect by debunking pseudoscience like homeopathy? is our knowledge killing gullible people?"

Rob you manic, don't you see - the whole purpose of this blog is to remove people's ability to enjoy xkcd by debunking the idea that it is funny! Thus our knowledge is removing joy from the world JUST AS debunking homeopathy kills dumbasses. Stare long into an abyss and it stares into you etc etc

p.s. this is why Carl's full name is "Carl 'Ugly' Wheeler, The Happiness Stealer"

@Rob: I don't think so, for two reasons. First, it is possible that people are resorting to Homeopathy as a replacement for modern medicine. This of course can be very damaging in the event that a disease is real and curable by doctors, but a doctor is not consulted because of a misguided belief in Homeopathy.

Second, Homeopathy relies very heavily on faith. If the placebo effect is in fact happening, it's only because people believe the treatment is real and helpful. It occurs to me to question what kind of people will believe in homeopathy to begin with. Someone who would believe in homeopathy to begin with, is not as likely to change their mind when you try to explain to them why it's a sham. Either they are smart enough to know it's a sham, but believe it anyways because they want to have faith him something, or they are dumb enough to think that it's real and that you don't know what you're talking about. (I have met both)

I just want to mention again how terribly wrong his use of "evolution" is in this context. This use of bad science is as egregious as making a comic about heavier weights falling faster than lighter weights. Yes, that IS how bad the science is, and on a comic where he tries to make fun of charlatans for bad science no less!

I don't really mind that Randall just made up the homeopathy magazine. It had such a generic title that it sounds good for something you'd just make up off the top of your head as an example. Like some friends are talking shit and the subject of homeopathy comes up, and someone says they'd totally write into like, Homeopathic Monthly or whatever, and say blah.

Rob, your impotence and girth is of an unquantifiable value. Have you forgotten that to make things a joke you need to append "Zing!" to the end? Randall, the paragon of hilarity and the penultimate leader of the hive mind, has implied this in his comic with the numerical value of seven hundred and sixty-four.

The ultimate leader, of course, is Randall's mom. Her address to her proletariat drones - us - reads: "Please view my son's comic every day to keep his self-esteem up. When he's upset he tends to make snarky jokes belittling people who appear less intelligent than himself - like homeopaths and anthropologists. He's so proud of graduating with a physics degree, but he seems incapable of being humble. Haha, still my precocious kid! Anyway, with love, Randall's mommy. XOXO"

Well, vaccination works by getting your body to produce antibodies against diseases.

Homeopathy gets that muddled up into thinking that you could get your body to produce antibodies against *any* toxin. So if you wanted to protect yourself from lead poisoning, you'd take tiny, weeny doses of lead and you'd build up a resistance to lead poisoning.

And not have brain damaged children, etc.

But it won't do that either, because the other thing that homeopaths push is the 'memory' of water, and how this is intensified the more reductions you do. But that involves diluting the original substance a hundred times over for each 'reduction', which, curiously, is what annoyed me about Randy's cartoon - he couldn't even get the numbers correct when he was trying to slate homeopathy.

This was awful, just terrible. I honestly think this is the worst XKCD put up in a long time. It's confusingly laid out, its not funny in the slightest and when you actually think about what he's trying to say it just doesn't make a lick of sense. I suppose ole Randy isn't as much of a science God as he'd like his readers to think he is if he can't get a proper grasp on evolutionary psychology.

The women you are know are apparently really weird about pregnancy and babies. My wife wouldn't say "we're pregnant" on grounds of technical inaccuracy, but "we made a baby" is certainly something she would, and it's not unheard of for couples to describe themselves as being pregnant. You can't spend so much time attacking Randy for having unrealistic dialogue and then turn around and attack some of the few examples of more realistic dialogue for technical inaccuracy or having implications that they do not, in actual fact, have.

xkcd suddenly makes a lot of sense with this comic. Randall must have misunderstood the application of homeopathy such that he thought diluting comedy would intensify humor, whereas the homeopathic reality is that doing so has only served to cancel out all symptoms of comedy.

Homeopathy tells that the more you dilute the medicine, the stronger it gets. So a very small drop of a, say, 1000 L container with a diluted aspirine could cure a hadache.So if they dilute the sperm, it gets "more effective", thus increasing the chance of pregnacy.That's the joke; it's stupid, and so is homeopathy and Randall.

"And lastly, the baster that the man is holding, the one which will be inserted into the woman, appears to be the same length as the distance from the woman's knee to her foot, and wider than her leg. Discuss."

This gross size disparity has never been a problem for me.

Also, for Fred, the theory of homeopathy is this:

A toxin has a certain "resonance" that causes disease. When placed in water and succussed, the water takes on the anti-resonance of the toxin. By diluting the water, this anti-resonance is increased (there's more water than toxin).

Finally, once the product has been diluted to the point where there's (statistically) no toxin, the only thing remaining is anti-resonance material (water, sugar, or whatever).

This material is then given to the patient. Because only a given resonance creates certain ill effects, (something that gives you a stomach ache resonates at the same as anything else that gives you a stomach ache) the anti-resonance counters the effects of the toxin that is in your body.

Which is why the key ingredient in homeopathic sleeping pills is caffeine.

Cam, you take my name out of the this, you sick bastard! All I mean is, seriously, Randall sucks hell at understanding how stick figures work. That baster is infinitely wider than the person it will be inserted into(since a line technically has no width). That's what bothers me. Because, you see, this person is making money out of comics without understanding how they should work. Like that time when he drew a muppet with a face when his people barely have facial hair!

So Randall "anthropologizes" now? No wonder he has so much time to write this comic! Zing!

And wait, he made a friendly "jibe"? Last I checked, that either had to do with ships or meant "to agree with". Since he couldn't have meant either of those, I can only assume the word he wanted was "jab." Come on, Randall! Can't you even get your freaking apologies right?

I've taken the liberty of archiving the apology in case he changes it:http://people.msoe.edu/~brayshaj/files/xkcd_apology_error.png

Gamer_2k4, you are thinking of "jib" and "jive", respectively. A "jibe" or "gibe" is an insulting or mocking remark, possibly with a connotation similar to "good natured ribbing". Jab would also be a close synonym.

@Fred:Perhaps that's part of the reason Randall replaced the description text. He realized that he could no longer claim his comic was about language (or math, or sarcasm, or romance), so he threw in a placeholder under the guise of an apology until he could come up with something better.

"Homeopathy Monthly" may not exist, but "Homeopathy Today" does, so Randall may have been trying to avoid the notably litigious nutters.

The idea of homeopathy (as put out by it's inventor, Hahnemann) is that "like cures like". He decided that eating the bark of a particular tree gave him malaria-like symptoms. Therefore, he decided, diluting the bark would cure actual malaria. Hahnemann did this with no pretence to science, he just tried loads of things and wrote down the symptoms he gave himslef and matched them to real symptoms from actual illnesses.

Haveing the alt text printed below the comic is great. It means I don't have to bless that hive of scum and filith with a page veiw just to be fully disgussted/enraged/left dead inside/confuused by this pitiful excuse for amusment.

Dear Atheism Weekly. I have some minor corrections regarding last week's issue. Firstly, Richard Dawkins was born in Nairobi, not Mombasa. Secondly, there is a God and he is going to send you to Hell, in which you'll burn in agony for all eternity.

"It means I don't have to bless that hive of scum and filith with a page veiw just to be fully disgussted/enraged/left dead inside/confuused by this pitiful excuse for amusment."

You're right! It's far more amusing or gratifying to criticize something ad nauseam. Everyone loves a critic, especially one who can't spell, believes in homeopathy, and/or believes in an afterlife! You're SO good at finding little problems/inconsistencies! I'll bet you're a riot with friends and family.

and @July 13, 2010 10:40 AM

"Now all that's left is to affix "Zing!" to the end of each post, and between that and Rob'z Rantz we need never waste more than a line of text on cuddlefish ever again!"

You're so right. We're far too elite to waste time on those elitists! wait...hold on... shit I lost it...

@Anon 9:45I found Homeopathy Today when I was looking for Homeopathy Monthly. There is no mention of an issue after December 2008 on the website. So, it's not the July 2010 issue of H.T. Randall is bitching about.

@P.A.The straw man magazine matters not because homeopathy magazines actually exist, but because Randall ascribed a particular spelling error to a nonexistent issue of this nonexistent magazine.

If homeopaths frequently spelled Echinacea wrong, the straw man would be fine. But I can't find any evidence that they do so (the genitive echinaceae is used in evidence based medicine papers, not homeopathy). Thus, the spelling error is also a straw man, and Randall gets probably the most basic rule of biological nomenclature wrong; he doesn't capitalize the genus himself.

If Randall wanted to pick on homeopaths for using outdated biological names (like Elaps corallinus instead of Micrurus corallinus), that would be fine; homeopaths do use older names. Randall seems like exactly the kind of douchy pedant with a minimal understanding of taxonomy that would think that an outdated name is objectively "wrong".

I just realized:Not only does Randall get homeopathy's like cures like backwards, but I don't think he gets the difference between herbal medicine and homeopathy. This seems to be a pretty common misconception, so I don't entirely blame him, but if you're going to criticize homeopathy, figure out what it's not.

Homeopathy and herbal medicine get conflated because both attract flaky new-age types that believe in all kinds of total bullshit and have an unreasonable aversion to normal medical practices. However, herbal medicine isn't total bullshit; herbal remedies aren't diluted to nothing, and they actually can work (although modern pharmaceuticals often work better).

Why do I think Randall doesn't get the difference? Because he mentioned ECHINACEA specifically. Echinacea is HUGE in the herbal remedy market (#5 in sales according to this: http://www.emedmag.com/html/pre/fea/features/031502.asp). While Echinacea is also used in homeopathic preparations, it does not seem to be a major homeopathic remedy.

Arnica is the biggest seller homeopathically according to some sites (and the other contenders seem to be propietary mixtures). Zinc** and the duck liver flu thing are also big sellers (and Sepia seems to be somewhat popular, thank god the homeopaths only needed one).

Since Randall mentioned Echinacea, rather than Arnica or Zinc, I strongly suspect that he thinks herbal remedies are the same as homeopathy. Any hype Echinacea is getting isn't really for the homeopathic version, just the herbal remedy version.

**@CamZinc is also marketed as both a nutritional (herbal?) supplement and in homeopathic form. There is evidence that zinc supplements (the kind that actually have zinc, not the homeopathic ones) help with colds. Just make sure you read the label and don't get the homeopathic version (which will mention a dilution factor like 30C or 12X).

The magazine was never meant to be real, and neither was the spelling mistake. To criticise Randall for riffing on a non-existent magazine is pointless, and to call it a "straw man" is absurd. You don't call a comedian's description of an airplane a straw man because he didn't really take a flight last week and eat the crappy food, even though he's describing it like he did.

He picked Echinacea because it is homeopathy-related and more likely to be spelled incorrectly in a hypothetical Homeopathy Monthly magazine than most related terms.

As much as it pains me to defend Randall I think we're getting a bit too autistic about this whole thing.

OK, let's say the crazy man some comedian talks about meeting in the street. He doesn't exist and is merely a device used to tell a joke. He could be real, and the situation described is plausible, but both the joke-teller and the audience know that a certain amount of artistic licence is being taken for the greater good of humour.

You don't need to worry about ruining the placebo effect. A couple of the forumites aver the placebo effect works even when the patient knows it's a placebo. One of them was "trying to invoke a placebo effect" in himself.

Alright, Anon@2:22, you win (on the strawman issue which wasn't originally my main point; I'm not yielding on the capitalization Randall fucked up or his picking an important non-homeopathic remedy to exemplify homeopathy).

I missed the joke (is that a symptom of autism?). Now I see Randall was setting up a joke like this one:

Dear editor,I have two small corrections to yesterday's article,1: D-Day occured when we invaded the USSR on June 6th, 1945, not June 7th2: Also, your mom's a whore

Point 1 is the setup and is unimportant; a mild rebuke in contrast to the scathing insult in point 2.

Fred: you make a good point, so allow me to clarify: Taking tiny amounts of a virus or whatever is how vaccinations against that particular virus or whatever work. The issue with homeopathy is that it pretends you can get "vaccinated" against Terrible Thing X by taking a tiny amount of Other Thing Y that can sometimes cause the same effect. So for example (I'm making this up, but then again, so are they) you want to be immune to a virus that causes stomach problems, you would take a tiny amount of E Coli, for example.

A separate issue is that you wouldn't actually be taking e coli, you would be taking water that once was in the same container as water that once had e coli in it, but again, different issue.

PA: Yes! that is EXACTLY why it is a straw man joke. Instead of choosing an actual magazine, he made one up to represent them. I believe entirely that there are magazines that stupid and perhaps even worse. He should have chosen a real one. That would have made all the difference.

So, please, tell me what's wrong with the Roadster? It's a solid car in every respect. I can understand that it's totally unnecessary to mention the Roadster in particular except as an attempt to establish geekcred, but your disgust seems to be towards the car itself.

Also, before somebody jumps on my arse about xkcd probably not making any money from mentioning the Roadster and therefore not fitting into the definition of product placement, I still think that it's pretentious as hell to say that something is good without saying why.

Captcha is concesi. That might mean concise in some obscure Romance language, which I hope it was.

I disagree. I'm REALLY glad that he didn't spend time explaining why he likes the Tesla Roadster in his comic.

Seems to me that "Tesla Roadster" here is standing in for what comics that weren't being geeky for the sake of geeky would call a ferrari or something like that. I think it does detract, but I can't get too annoyed by it.

I didn't like the joke much, but I think the art was well done. I think the joke itself would work much better in A Softer World. Both the tone of the comic and the fact that the art is photographic would be much better suited, I think. Still, I'm impressed with the art. I'm not impressed like the sycophant who was linked above, but impressed all the same.

The art IS cool. Maybe not beautiful, and probably pretty easy to do if you know your way around computer-y art programs (I don't), but the idea comes through, and it's definitely cool by Randall's standards. I was blown away at first. But here's my problem: he could, and should, have saved it for a really funny idea, and really thrown a monkey wrench into Carl's nefarious plan to turn xkcd into a wasteland of HATE.

Instead, he made a joke that I've seen a million times before: "You have a cool thing, I'm gonna distract you (/kill you) and take your cool thing!" And you know what, even though I just said I've seen it a million times before, I can't even think of a TV show or film example to back myself up. You know what I CAN think of? Me and my dorky friends in fifth grade. "Oh man, you got the new Zelda? Man, you're so lucky! I'm gonna come over to your house and shoot you just so I can play it!" And we'd all laugh, because damn it, taking people's stuff was FUNNY then, no matter how you delivered it! Now, it can still be funny, but not the way Randall wrote this comic.

It just infuriates me that he paired one of his worst jokes with one of his best pictures, and decided that was fine. I guess he must not be self-conscious about his comics due to him not reading this blog, but damn it, I'd want to cram as much impressiveness as possible into one comic if it were me.

On the most recent comic, it seems like he spent a bunch of time messing around to make a kinda decent sunset picture, then suddenly realized he didn't have a comic to post. So he went, "Oh no! Now what? Oh, I know, I can add some stick figures to this! And I can talk about that cool thing I wish I had at the same time! Awesome! ...Oh, maybe I should put in a joke too. Uh... uhhhh... aha! Hat guy threatening someone! Hahaha, hilarious! I am a GENIUS."

Blah de blah. After all the drama from the last two comics, I just can't feel anything about this latest boring strip and its boring "OOH WOW A COLORED SUNSET UR SO AWESOME RANDALL" blah. Which is sad for a Black Hat Guy strip.

This is being pretty nit picky... but that last sentance in the comic... why does it end in a question mark? Read it out loud and see if that sounds realistically phrased like a question? See, I just did it there. The sentence is too long and has too many "and"s for it to end in a question and still make sense. Not that bad, unrealistic dialogue is anything new to XKCD, just putting it out there.

Randall, once more, is selling himself way short. (Actually, he's selling his fanbase shorter, but whatever.)

If he could do a color drawing--lackluster as it is--between Monday and now, it means he could still keep to his three-day-a-week schedule and and do color. This "color comic once every few months" business only highlights his laziness.

If I weren't cynical, I'd think Randall came up with this idea from the Jules Verne book, or from the Éric Rohmer film; unfortunately I am aware he most certainly got this idea from random browsing on Wikipedia.

Counterpoint: the art is not good. The art is something that, in actuality, takes 5 to 10 minutes to do.Why do I say that?Well look at it. Look at it closer. Now tell me: do you see anything but straight line squggles there? Is there something more to it than having one colour be more conjested around the sun? That's really all it is - a sketch but with paint.

In art terms, this is known as "making use of your tools to create patterns" Or in a more frank way, "trying to bullshit non-artists into thinking you're actually good at art".

Also, that's not anything like a sunset whatsoever, beyond having a yellow circle in the middle. Would someone mind telling me why on earth the reflective ocean is pitch-black, and darker than the beach?(for reference, here's an actual sunset: http://www.stanford.edu/~jbaugh/saw/studentphoto/Scenery/CampsBaySunset.JPGThe actual redness of the sky depends on how close to the equator you are, so here's another pic of a red sky: https://academics.skidmore.edu/weblogs/students/awells/sunset.jpgNotice how it is completely unlike Randall's red sky beyond sorta being the same colour if you ignore the fact that Randall decided 25% of the lit sky must be pitch black for no reason.)

And this is just a comment. If Carl praises the art in /any/ way I'm gonna write an entire review, because I am REALLY flipped off by the amount of people that think this is good art!

That said, the whole "he draws stick figures but he's also a really good artist" thing annoys me to no end. Yes, he occasionally manages to do some interesting stuff with minimal colors and shading, and yes, he once traced a nice picture of a boat, and yes, he drew something that is easily recognizable as a human face. That doesn't make a person a 'good artist'.

I know people are going to argue that it's his style (and therefore immune to criticism), and I'll admit that the stick figures are arguably emblematic of XKCD, but it's really starting to piss me off, especially when he does somewhat detailed comics like this, that he refuses to even give anyone a fucking face.

Who am I to say anything: I'm just a humanities scholar with a degree in an aesthetic discipline. Between partying it up and sitting around making up nonsense, however, I managed to get an unreal doubleplus ungood degree.

So, I feel that I can unequivocally say that this art is crap. I don't even need a degree for that. I used to make similarly garish doodles in elementary school. I got gold stars every now and then for "expressing" myself.

As for Randall's "style," crap artists don't get to claim that they have a style. Styles have something unique about them. Amateurishness is not unique. Styles also tend to have a theoretical foundation; the artist attempts to "say" something with them, or, at the very least, many people are able to recognize them as "saying" something meaningful or particular. This art only says: "I don't know art" -- not very interesting.

I've never in my life seen a sunset where the horizon is on fire but the rest of the world is plunged into total darkness. Also strangely, the sunset, unable to illuminate the Earth, is on the other hand so incredibly bright that its unbearable luminescence has washed out the stick figures' facial features, leaving nothing but a bright, blinding white light. This is not a sunset: it is an atomic explosion. The black spots all over the sky, however, seem to suggest that the very fabric of space-time is unraveling before our eyes; so, perhaps a black hole is opening up where our sun once was.

XKCD is about language, or so it claims, but Randall seems to miss out entirely on the splendors of the figurative. Perhaps this is an example of "sarcasm"? It has to be. Randall must hate his audience. Each new comic repeats: "You fucking assholes. You're going to like this, even though it's shit."

That's really the only way that I can pretend to read XKCD without feeling embarrassed for its creator.

@Fred,Saying "art doesn't need to be realistic" only applies when it's INTENTIONALLY not meant to be realistic. Unless you're telling me that he fucked up the colouring on purpose, I'm calling it terrible art.

And if he did do it inteiontally... that's even worse, because he did it for no apparent purpose or reason whatsoever, making it even worse art!

Plasma, exactly! I look at that and all I see is that he took a black background and blotched hues of red, yellow and white to make the sky, and some sandy color for... the sand.

That's not good art, it's blotchy and ugly, and a mockery of effort. "Telltale Beat" and "Campfire" looked much better, and I think that might have to do with them not having color...

This being said, why doesn't Randall work at least with simple coloring, like he did in that "Reverse Polish Notation" comic, in a regular basis? It looked nice. I won't say it saved the comic as a whole, but it's a start. Maybe he'd see he can, you know, improve, instead of staying on the same shitty local maximum being praised by his primordial sludge of a fanbase.

@Fred: most artists are expected to master realism and other "traditional" styles before they can dick around with something original. Yet, even if Randall occasionally practices neo-classical painting in his atelier while taking breaks from revolutionizing math and physics, there's nothing original about this art, which a casual walk down the halls of an elementary school will tell you.

It's not meant to be realistic - it's a stylised depiction and I think it looks gorgeous. It makes me want to hire a cherry picker so that when the sunset's finished, I can raise myself up to watch it all over again.

That is art. The comic you saw was pandering bullshit. The last comic insulted anthropologists, this one simply insults taste and intelligence. xkcd is now officaly nothing more than a hollow shell of what it once dreamed of being. Randall needs a holiday, and probably a good fuck too.

I'm not sure how the latest comic is supposed to be funny.Hat guy is nerdy and awkward so he tells some other guy he'll beat him up and then take his Tesla Roadster. Also, bonus! it's related to this green flash phenomenon.Is there a joke I'm missing in there?

I can't believe all these people shitting on art in the last comic. What more do you want from art in a fucking xkcd? It's as good as it gets. Just shut up. And Nazlfrag, I sure hope you're being sarcastic about your "art".

That said, xkcd is still terribly unfunny and you guys should rather focus on this.

The art is mediocre if we're judging it on the same standards as pure visual art.Mediocre is, for most people, still a little enjoyable to look at.This is a comic that updates 3 times a week.This particular one has better art than most updates of most webcomics, just by virtue of being at all enjoyable to look at on its own.

Saying it's better than most art of most webcomics is like saying that you're smarter than most people in an orphanage. Technically true, but absolutely meaningless given the incredibly low standards.

At most like 10% of webcomics aren't painful to look at, meaning yes, xkcd is better than them. Compare that to, say, Sam and Fuzzy, which manages a page and a half of amazing art while keeping to the same schedule Munroe does. Or Romantically Apocalyptic, which once was updating on the same schedule and looks like this: rom.ac

As long as we're on the topic of webcomics, Randall's is somewhat familiar: uninspired, poorly drawn black-and-white sketch comics punctuated rarely by a color comic that seems good only because of its context--a swamp of mediocrity. In terms of content, he has a tendency to get on his soapboxes and white-knight unnecessarily, as well as a penchant for bringing up creepy, sexual topics.

hey you guys, do you remember Black Hat Guy? Do you remember how he is a psychopath? Well GUESS WHAT he is still amoral and inclined to murder people/steal objects of value! Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Also I just read about the Tesla Roadster and I am going to name drop it for no good fucking reason!

Shitty art that will guarantee the Armchair Art Critics come out in force because ZOMG color, a joke that has been told quite literally dozens of times in xkcd already (and far more creatively at that), and Blatant Fanservice? randy, you get an "F" for Fuck you.

Gryffilion +1. Carjacking is only funny when you're doing it to run over hookers and ... I'm sure Grand Theft Auto II had a point, right? I don't remember there ever being a "goal", but maybe I was playing it wrong...

Aw man. I read Charles's post as "It makes me want to hire a cherry picker so that when the sunset's finished, I can raise it up to watch it all over again.", which was delightfully stupid and not an xkcd reference.

I always liked that post. It was like one of those "math has practical applications" things in a trig textbook, but without any dumbing-down. Randall demonstrated that he could treat his readers like normal people with geeky tendencies, instead of treating them like antisocial geeks with even geekier tendencies.

OK OK, homeopathy has been in the news IN GERMANY. but xkcd is made by an american for americans (for example). Do you think he was actually trying to tie into this story? Maybe he was, I'll admit I had no idea about this when I wrote my post. maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. It seems unlikely that he was making a joke about current events in germany.

So maybe this is a shot in the dark... but did anyone else notice that exactly 1 comic after taking a shot at Anthropologists, calling them not a real science, etc... he then chooses next to aim at Homeopathy, which is much more widely accepted to be psuedo-scient? Seems almost like the backlash after the last one made him think "Uh oh, I gotta write something that will get everyone back on my side" so he took a stab at something he knew none of his fan base would be upset over his criticism. Even CARL didn't have a problem with him taking a shot at Homeopathy.

Best thing to do to bring people together is find a common enemy, and Homeopathy is kind of that. Even those of us who were pissed off last week admit this time he's justified to mock Homeopathy. You think he planned that, or am I giving him wayyyyy too much credit?

Are you sure you know what a strawman is? It's not just any form of weak or invalid argument. It's a very specific type where you create an argument that looks similar to that you're arguing against, but is fundamentally weaker and than argue against that point instead.

Arguably, the comic itself could be labeled a strawman if it weren't for the fact that you can't really get much weaker than homeopathy anyway.

However, the alt-text is only a strawman if you think that Randall is actually presenting the typo as homeopathy's argument and that the 'correction' was attacking this argument. Alternatively, you can say that the fictional magazine is homeopathy's argument and the alt text is attacking that. Either way, this is pretty clearly ridiculous. The magazine is used as a symbol of homeopathy, but not as a stand-in for their arguments in any way.

Technically, you're correct: Randall hasn't mischaracterized homeopathy's argument, so it's not a strawman in the strict logical-fallacy sense. However, colloquially (and by "colloquially" I mean "lots of smart people say this" rather than "hillbillies talk this way") people use "strawman" to refer to any weak mischaracterization of your opponent. In my discipline, for example, when someone claims that their method is better than someone else's, and they poorly implement that other method, we call it a strawman, since you've mischaracterized the facts about your opponent.

This is exactly what Randall did in fabricating a typographical error and then "calling" homeopaths on it. You can say it's technically not a dictionary-defined strawman, but to say that "it's certainly nothing approaching a strawman" is pretty pedantic.

I love when prescriptivists start pretending that they understand that language is fluid, "but it's still wrong and anyone who uses it otherwise is therefore dumb."

that hamfisted refusal to accept that any use besides the one you learned in your logic class is absolutely unacceptable, but still desperately scrabbling to convince people that you're not being a prescriptivist. "sometimes people are just wrong! I'm not telling them they are, it's just a fact!" it's one of those beautifully human moments that perfectly capture the condition of having absolutely no self-awareness.

"but it's still wrong and anyone who uses it otherwise is therefore dumb."

I figure reading you is like when quiet religious folk see gun-toting christian militants on tv. Disturbed by the fact that what they found as useful is the basis for someone elses hate. Likewise it seems that to you anyone who differs even mildly from your polemic are up for the firing squad. Nice job at becoming an object lesson in prescriptivism (and possibly the butt of your own joke about self-awareness!)

IMHO and in my moderate education in linguistics something can be poor usage but not wrong. Perhaps your prescriptivism surrounding descriptivism is the issue? ;-)

This is getting tedious. Look, it's okay to be a little bit wrong on the internet, okay? I admitted that your objection had logical merit, but argued that you were being kind of a dick about it. Why do you have to keep reinforcing my second point? Can't you simultaneously accept your victory and admit that other people can be right, too?

Captcha: Perit. Prescriptivists get SO upset when I misspell the names of common birds.

"Can't you simultaneously accept your victory and admit that other people can be right, too?"

Poor pronoun aside. I agree but it's kind of poor sport that Rob can be amused by the total lack of self-awareness in people (or in this case the apparent total lack - I fully admit my ability to be blind from time-to-time) and I'm not allowed to amused by yours?

that's a new one! "I'm only prescriptivist if you're a prescriptivist about the word." unfortunately, "I know you are, but what am I?" stopped being effective after, oh, third grade?

I also like your self-characterization of being a "quiet religious folk" to my "gun-toting christian militant," and not a "prescriptivist dick on the Internet" to my "person calling you a prescriptivist dick on the internet." it's certainly amusing! it does a lot to reinforce my initial thoughts w/r/t your complete lack of self-awareness.

I'd say that's a pretty poor interpretation - if that's allowed without getting the "Scarlett D" applied again. More like you are being prescriptivist in (hopefully) a limited respect. Everyone makes mistakes - even descriptivists.

Re: Bigot vs. bigot - I see what you're getting at except the way I would define 'bigot' would exclude that. Perhaps something like "intolerant person calling someone intolerant of intolerance?" which is true but less of an argument since - IMHO anyway - it's kind of an equivocation.

except I'm not telling you how to use any words. I'm just telling you that you're a prescriptivist dick. see how this works?

maybe you're confusing my obvious mockery of your position, "but it's still wrong and anyone who uses it otherwise is therefore dumb"--the thing that I clearly put in quotes to distance myself from it--with something I actually genuinely believe? why are most prescriptivists so fucking illiterate?

I think he means you're being prescriptivist about the word prescriptivist. Apparently he feels that, were you truly a descriptivist, he could completely avoid the sentiment you were obviously and unambiguously trying to express by saying "nah I'm not that thing".

Yeah you're right, "bigot" didn't really work there since that implies more connections to race/culture than simply opinions

but still a comparison:

A: ARRGGGHH! FUCKING APPLES!!!B: Dude, calm down. There's no reason to be so intolerant towards apples.A: WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU SO INTOLERANT TO MY INTOLERANCE!!! FUCKING HYPOCRITE!!

Anon: ARRGGGHH! YOU USED A WORD WRONG!!!Rob: Dude, calm down. There's no reason to be so uptight about word usage language is fluid and shit.A: Oh so someone's opinion is different than your's it's wrong? Well your opinion is different than mine so you're wrong? You have to agree or else you're a hypocrite!!!

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

Frequently Asked Questions

Divided into two convenient categories, based on whether you think this website

Rob's Rants

When he's not flipping a shit over prescriptivist and descriptivist uses of language, xkcdsucks' very own Rob likes writing long blocks of text about specific subjects. Here are some of his excellent refutations of common responses to this site. Think of them as a sort of in-depth FAQ, for people inclined to disagree with this site.